Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers podcast. And before you listen to today's episode, I just

want to let you know about some news that Sarah and I are very excited about. And that is that our new book,

Learn Like a Lobster, is ready to pre-order now. We really care about everybody learning and growing

at work, but we know it is not easy to do. And so we're borrowing some brilliance from lobsters to help you to do it.

The book takes three inspiring and surprising abilities of lobsters in terms of how they grow

and applies it to how we can learn at work. So if you want some inspiration and you need some

practical insights to support your learning, growth and development. This is the book for you.

And if you pre-order now and send your pre-order to hello at learn like a lobster.com,

you can join the lobster library where we have a community of lobster learners ready for you to learn with,

some live sessions, and this will all happen before the book arrives.

So pre-order the book now, send it to hello at learn like a lobster.com

and get started with your learning straight away.

Now let's get on to today's episode.

Hi, my name's Sarah and in this squiggly career shortcut,

I'm going to be talking about why I think we should ban the word busy.

When I ask people to describe their week at work, in one word, pretty much 90% of people will say

busy. It's our default. It's our go-to word now to describe what work feels like. But it is quite a vague term.

And being busy can mean lots of different things. And I think when we say busy, it doesn't really

help us with what we might do differently or do more of the same. So we want to be more specific. If we're going to

use a word that helps us to reflect, that helps us to be more relevant and helps us to get better

at the work that we do, I think we want to challenge ourselves to go beyond busy. We also know

from the work of a psychologist called Dan Siegel that if we want to work

...